Professor Mobo Gao was born and brought up in a small Chinese village which he did not leave until he went to Xiamen University to study English. He then went to the U.K. and studied at various universities including Wales, Cambridge, and London, before he completed his Masters and Doctorate degrees at Essex. Gao has working experience at various universities in China, the U.K., and in Australia, and has been a visiting fellow at some of the world's leading universities, including Oxford and Harvard.
Gao worked at the University of Tasmania before he was appointed Director of the Confucius Institute at Adelaide in 2008. His research interests include the study of rural China, contemporary Chinese politics and culture, Chinese migration to Australia, and Chinese language. His publications include four monographs and numerous book chapters and articles. One of his books, the critically acclaimed Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China (University of Hawaii Press, 2007), is a case study of the village he came from. His latest book, The Battle of China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (Pluto Press, 2008), is a reassessment of the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution.
